“The first night of the residency was amazing,” White said during a phone interview last week. “It exceeded my expectations. There were so many people there, so it was definitely a success. I can only imagine it getting better.”

White began playing the piano when he was 6 years old. Once he got into high school in Hemet, he joined the school band and fell in love with jazz and blues music.

“At that same time I started singing at church,” he recalled. “I had never had any vocal lessons, but the youth pastor was like, ‘You're great.' But my family was like, ‘Eh, Denny, you're not really a singer, so just play piano.' That part is kind of sad, but I progressed because I thought it was so cool to be able to sing and sit down at the piano.”

During his sophomore year he began to write his own songs, entering the first one he inked in a songwriting competition. “I think it was about, like, chasing your dreams -- it was very cliché -- something you would write in high school. I didn't win the competition, but I went on to one of the final rounds. It was very Ben Folds-y because I listened to him so much in high school.”

The first CD he ever purchased was (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, the second album from Britpop mainstay Oasis. White began humming and singing the chorus to the track “She's Electric” while reminiscing about his purchase: “I loved that song a lot,” he said, adoringly.

Once he graduated high school, he moved to Orange County to attend Vanguard University in Costa Mesa in 2006. Coming from a middle-class family White didn't qualify for financial aid, even though the expenses for the school were far beyond what he or his family could afford at the time. With just one semester under his belt, he left Vanguard and bounced around a few community colleges, including Orange Coast College and Fullerton College.

He started to get more serious about his music, and in 2007 his debut in the spotlight came when a musician friend of his couldn't make a gig performing at a restaurant in Riverside.

“I was like, ‘Dude, what am I supposed to play?'” he recalled asking his friend in a panic. “He said, ‘Just play all of the songs you know.' So I showed up at Citrus City Grille, and it was kind of a posh place with a grand piano, and I was only 18 -- and it scared me to death. But once I got up there and started doing it, I was fine.”

Word of White's performance in Riverside traveled back to O.C., and he landed his first gig on his own merits at Citrus City Grille in the Orange Circle. That year, White also formed his first band, which he says played a “rock-pop-piano sorta thing.”

“It was awesome right off the bat,” he remembered. “We got shows at the Roxy and the Glass House and it was what I had always wanted to do.”

Last June, however, White decided to quit the band and go solo, since new songs he had begun writing were clashing with the group's approach. Seeking further inspiration, he flew to Denver to meet up with friend and fellow O.C. musician Brent Kutzle, bassist for OneRepublic, to work on some songwriting.

“He was the first person to really push me to go solo,” he recalled. “I would have more control of my own music (by doing so), and it's really where my heart was anyway. I was writing very poppy, kind of throwback jazzy stuff anyway and it just wasn't fitting with the typical O.C. band with an indie rock sound.”

Lately, White says gigs have been steady and stable; he's been able to live modestly yet comfortably off his music career. After finishing up this residency at Detroit Bar -- where he's backed by a full-band, including drummer Tyler DeYoung, guitarist John Cater and bassist Eric Nelson -- White plans on heading into the studio to record a new EP or, depending on time and funding, possibly his first full-length album.

While pondering new material recently, White says a friend wondered that if he had one last thing to tell the world, what would it be and how would he put that into a song? This struck a chord with him, lurking in his mind and writing ever since.

“I thought, like, what would I say if I got to go in front of, say, 10,000 screaming people at Verizon? For me, love is at the forefront of everything -- it's not just romance, but a more worldly kind of love. You flip on the TV today and I feel like we've lost some hope and people have stopped really fighting for things.

“I'll never be able to write (a song like) U2's ‘One,' but (I strive for) something like that, something about love and struggle and losing yourself in the joys that come with love and just life in general. Me, well, right now it's about figuring out my soul and life and finding my sound ... just figuring out where I'm going and why I'm pursuing music ... so that I don't write songs like ‘I should have gone to law school …'”

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